The ten most costly catastrophes in U.S. history have all been
natural disasters--seven of them hurricanes--and all have occurred
since 1989, a period, ironically, that Congress has dubbed the Decade
for Natural Disaster Reduction. Ted Steinberg, professor of history
and law at Case Western Reserve University, looks at how much of
the death and destruction has been well within the realm of human
control. Surveying more than a century of losses from weather and
seismic extremes, he exposes the fallacy of seeing such calamities
as simply random events.
Acts of God explores the unnatural history
of natural calamity, the decisions of business leaders and government
officials that have paved the way for the greater losses of life
and property, especially among those least able to withstand such
blows--America's poor, elderly and minorities. Seeing nature or
God as the primary culprit, Steinberg argues, has helped to obscure
the fact that, in truth, some Americans are better protected from
violence of nature than their counterparts lower down the socioeconomic
ladder. Donald Worster, the author of
Dust Bowl: The Southern
Plains in the 1930s, says, "This compelling book blows away
many obscuring clouds of misunderstanding and denial in our national
environmental memory."
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